Coronary artery disease is a very common ailment that affects millions of people annually. While significant strides have been made in the treatment of coronary artery disease, including the use of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG), a good understanding of the pathogenesis and the mechanism of the disease is still lacking.
Coronary artery disease may cause the blood vessels providing blood to the heart to develop lesions, such as a stenosis (abnormal narrowing of a blood vessel). As a result, blood flow to the heart may be restricted. A patient suffering from coronary artery disease may experience chest pain, referred to as chronic stable angina during physical exertion or unstable angina when the patient is at rest. A more severe manifestation of disease may lead to myocardial infarction, or heart attack.
A need exists to provide more accurate data relating to coronary lesions, for example, size, shape, location, functional significance (e.g., whether the lesion impacts blood flow), etc. Patients suffering from chest pain and/or exhibiting symptoms of coronary artery disease may be subjected to one or more tests that may provide some indirect evidence relating to coronary lesions. For example, noninvasive tests may include electrocardiograms, biomarker evaluation from blood tests, treadmill tests, echocardiography, single positron emission computed tomography (SPECT), and positron emission tomography (PET). These noninvasive tests, however, typically do not provide a direct assessment of coronary lesions or assess blood flow rates. The noninvasive tests may provide indirect evidence of coronary lesions by looking for changes in electrical activity of the heart (e.g., using electrocardiography (ECG)), motion of the myocardium (e.g., using stress echocardiography), perfusion of the myocardium (e.g., using PET or SPECT), or metabolic changes (e.g., using biomarkers).
For example, anatomic data may be obtained noninvasively using coronary computed tomographic angiography (CCTA). CCTA may be used for imaging of patients with chest pain and involves using computed tomography (CT) technology to image the heart and the coronary arteries following an intravenous infusion of a contrast agent. However, CCTA also cannot provide direct information on the functional significance of coronary lesions, for example, whether the lesions affect blood flow. In addition, since CCTA is purely a diagnostic test, it can neither be used to predict changes in coronary blood flow, pressure, or myocardial perfusion under other physiologic states (e.g., exercise).
Thus, patients may require an invasive test, such as diagnostic cardiac catheterization, to visualize coronary lesions. Diagnostic cardiac catheterization may include performing conventional coronary angiography (CCA) to gather anatomic data on coronary lesions by providing a doctor with an image of the size and shape of the arteries. CCA, however, does not provide data for assessing the functional significance of coronary lesions. For example, a doctor may not be able to diagnose whether a coronary lesion is harmful without determining whether the lesion is functionally significant. Thus, CCA has led to a procedure referred to as an “oculostenotic reflex,” in which interventional cardiologists insert a stent for every lesion found with CCA regardless of whether the lesion is functionally significant. As a result, CCA may lead to unnecessary operations on the patient, which may pose added risks to patients and may result in unnecessary heath care costs for patients.
During diagnostic cardiac catheterization, the functional significance of a coronary lesion may be assessed invasively by measuring the fractional flow reserve (FFR) of an observed lesion. FFR may be defined as the ratio of the mean blood pressure or flow downstream of a lesion divided by the mean blood pressure or flow upstream from the lesion, for example, the aortic pressure, under conditions of increased coronary blood flow, for example, when induced by intravenous administration of adenosine. Blood pressures may be measured by inserting a pressure wire into the patient. Thus, the decision to treat a lesion based on the determined FFR may be made after the initial cost and risk of diagnostic cardiac catheterization has already been incurred.
To reduce the above disadvantages of invasive FFR measurements, HeartFlow Inc. has developed methods for assessing coronary anatomy, myocardial perfusion, and coronary artery flow noninvasively. Specifically, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations have been successfully used to predict spatial and temporal variations of flow rate and pressure of blood in arteries, including FFR. Such methods and systems benefit cardiologists who diagnose and plan treatments for patients with suspected coronary artery disease, and predict coronary artery flow and myocardial perfusion under conditions that cannot be directly measured, for example, exercise, and to predict outcomes of medical, interventional, and surgical treatments on coronary artery blood flow and myocardial perfusion.
However, computational modeling of hemodynamics involves a reconstructed geometry of the patients' arteries, which is facilitated through high-resolution imaging. For example, many CFD frameworks for noninvasively calculating FFR assume that: (i) the geometry is known with certainty, (ii) clinical variables such as blood pressure, hematocrit, myocardial mass, etc. are known with certainty, and/or (iii) boundary conditions at the inlet and outlets of the computational model are known with certainty. However, in reality, the FFR predicted using CFD varies based on the accuracy of the available data and mathematical models that describe hemodynamics in the arteries. As a result, there is a need for methods and systems for incorporating and quantifying the effects of uncertainties in the available data, as well as mathematical models. In addition, there is a need for methods and systems for assigning confidence intervals to determined FFR values as well as ranking the sensitivity of FFR calculation to the possible values of different parameters.
The foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory only and are not restrictive of the disclosure.